WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish woman lay nearly upside down in labor for 75 days to save the lives of her two premature babies after the first of three fetuses growing inside her was born prematurely and died.
While a 92-year-old woman delivering a 60-year-old baby may sound like a bizarre plot twist from the movie “Benjamin Button,” it's true. Huang Yijun, 92, of southern China, recently delivered a child which she'd been carrying for well over half a century. The baby wasn't alive, however.
While stories about women giving birth in their 50s, 60s, and even 70s make for good headlines, these pregnancies are usually accomplished with donor eggs and in vitro fertilization (IVF). There is no set oldest age when you can get pregnant naturally, but fertility starts to decline as you age.
Eva Mendes
The actress was 40 when she gave birth to her first daughter with Ryan Gosling, Esmeralda, and 42 when she welcomed her second, Amada. “Really, I'm so incredibly tired,” Mendes said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show the first time around. “I thought I was tired before at times, but no.
If you are trying to get pregnant after age 50, you will probably need some fertility help. While it's not impossible to become pregnant naturally at 50, it is very rare. Women are born with all of the eggs they will ever have. As you get older, you have fewer eggs, and they are more likely to have abnormalities.
Can you have a normal, healthy pregnancy at 45? Yes. Assuming you have top-notch prenatal care during your pregnancy, you eat well and have a healthy lifestyle, you take care of yourself during your nine months, and you come into your pregnancy as healthy as can be, your pregnancy can be problem-free.
If you're older than 35 and hoping to get pregnant, you're in good company. Many families are delaying pregnancy well into their 30s and beyond — and delivering healthy babies. Taking special care can help give your baby the best start.
The study published by the University of St. Andrews and Edinburgh University in Scotland found that women have lost 90 percent of their eggs by the time they are 30 years old, and only have about 3 percent remaining by the time they are 40.
Yes, a girl can get pregnant before she gets her first period. Getting pregnant is related to ovulation. Because a girl can ovulate before having her first period, it is possible to become pregnant if she has sex.
Of course, as women age, the odds of conceiving also gradually lower. The ideal childbearing age is often considered to be in the late 20s and early 30s. Pregnancies later in life could come with some health risks. However, age is just one factor when it comes to giving birth to a child.
Dawn Brooke
While Xinju Tian and Maria Rosaria Veneruso are significantly older, Dawn Brooke is widely recognized as the oldest confirmed women to conceive naturally. Brooke became pregnant when she was 58 and then gave birth after she had turned 59.
However, the Guinness World Record indicates that the world's oldest confirmed father was 92 years old. This man was reportedly Les Colley, who lived from 1898 to 1998 in Australia. He welcomed his ninth child alongside his third wife when he was 92 years and 10 months old.
A Russian woman named Valentina Vassilyeva and her husband Feodor Vassilyev are alleged to hold the record for the most children a couple has produced. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, a total of 27 births.
Xinju Tian, who was 67 years old when she gave birth in 2023, set a new record for the oldest woman to give birth naturally.
The website of the world record authority Guinness World Records lists the oldest father ever as Australian Les Colley (1898-1998), who allegedly fathered his ninth child at age 92 with a Fijian woman he met through a dating agency.
The world's oldest father is believed to be Mr Ramajit Raghav, who was 94 years old when he fathered his first child in 2010. He and his then 52-year-old wife Shakuntala Devi had another son two years later.
A woman's peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. By age 30, fertility (the ability to get pregnant) starts to decline. This decline happens faster once you reach your mid-30s. By 45, fertility has declined so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely.
The man who is thought to have fathered the most children of all time is Moroccan Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif (1645 to 1727) with a total of more than 1,000, according to Guinness World Records.
The greatest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c . 1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 confinements she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.
The world's most fertile woman has had an incredible 44 children - and now has to raise her massive brood on her own. Mariam Nabatanzi had her record number of babies by the time she was just 36 and all with the same father.
The youngest father in the world is reportedly a boy from China, who, at 9 fathered a child with an 8-year-old girl. This occurred in 1910. There is also a 10-year-old father recorded in the USA, no details about the mother.
Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study's most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years.
Cheyenne, who has dark hair and blue-green eyes, isn't the smallest baby ever born. That honor rests with Kwek Yu Xuan, who was born at 7.5 ounces — the weight of an apple — in June 2020 in Singapore. Her mother also suffered from preeclampsia and gave birth by an emergency C-section, according to the BBC.
The longest interval between the birth of twins is 90 days, in the case of Molly and Benjamin West, dizygotic (fraternal) twins born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA to parents Lesa and David West (all USA) on 1 January and 30 March 1996.